Chan Lowe: Mr. Santorum's neighborhood

Welcome to nineteenth-century America. It’s an America where almost all of what we consume is produced right here in America, by American workers, except for fancy stuff like fine textiles from England. Where we’re practically a closed market, and we have the luxury of educating and training workers to perform specific tasks in the production chain—workers who need not be versatile because they will perform the same task from the moment they get out of grade school until they retire.

While nineteenth-century America is humming along in its closed, dynamic equilibrium, China is mostly an agrarian society. Goods are still carried in hand barrows or on poles slung across the shoulders of numberless coolies. Virtually nothing is exported from China except human labor to help build America’s expanding railroad system. In Japan, society is only beginning to break free of a feudal system that was never designed to foster economic efficiency or progress.

Nineteenth-century America is an America where higher education isn’t necessary, because other countries are not trying to steal what is left of our markets. They aren’t producing goods more cheaply than our workers can, and selling them to us in exchange for an ever-widening stream of our national wealth that flows relentlessly away from us, in a sick dependency wherein we must borrow from our suppliers in order to sustain our habits. It is an America where the best and brightest minds from abroad don’t come to our country to reap the benefits of our peerless institutions of higher learning, only to return home and use what they learned to compete more effectively against us.

This is Rick Santorum’s America, where college is for snobs, and where the populace, thanks to its benighted ignorance, will blithely lend a hand to foreigners while they drive a stake through its heart.